I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California. Every takeoff is the same, but I am always on alert for the one that will be different. In Bosnia or Boston. Panama or Palm Springs. On short…
The language of flight is filled with poetry and metaphoric potential. I use my experiences in flight as a pilot to better understand nonflying subjects.
“Holding” is one of a series of creative nonfiction essays borne from flight maneuvers—in this case, the “holding pattern.” I found inspiration from the technical aspects of holding and used them as a starting point to help me explore parallel themes in my nonflying life: relationships, risk, habitual patterns, and secret-keeping.
This essay was inspired by USAF duty as part of the US “War on Drugs.” I flew many holding patterns: flying a singular pattern for hours at a time. Whereas many C-130 missions are dynamic, holding was much more rote. Flying this particular kind of mission was unusual because many of the daily missions were nearly identical. The monotony and repetition of these flights sealed the details into my memory, allowing for easy recall decades later.
As I began to write about those flights, I gained clarity about my family of origin’s dynamics. I started to see parallels about how my family existed as “aircrew” related to a sibling’s experience with addiction.
When writing about sensitive family dynamics, I turn to advice Andre Dubus III shared at Longleaf Writers Conference about his brother. To paraphrase: …What happened behind that bedroom door is his story to tell. But what I experienced in the hallway is mine…
Whenever I navigate writing related to family members, I return to these words as a litmus test. I constantly ask: What part is my story?
“Holding” started as a poem, thanks to a question the poet and memoirist Seema Reza asked at the Fine Art Works Center. I can’t remember the question anymore, but the answer I wrote was “I orbit in the wide sky over the Gulf of California.” That line became a refrain echoing in each stanza. When I turned the poem into an essay, I kept this line and repeated it because it helped enact a holding pattern.
Often, my essays begin as poems. A poem allows me to distill the emotional truth that will eventually drive an essay. I read aloud my first draft and knew I’d expand “Holding” into an essay, in part, because of my fellow writers’ responses. They were wildly encouraging—something I remain grateful for. They responded with so many questions: What is a holding pattern? What were you doing on the missions? Why was the takeoff risky? And so on.
I weighed the value of offering the reader more explanation and context. I asked myself: Would an essay allow for more clarity? Could I interrogate a central “aboutness” in an essay more than if it stayed as a poem? Did I feel the potential to discover more about this subject/theme/lived experience as an essay?
In this case, the answer was yes. Explaining the intricacies around risks of the mission was something I couldn’t do in a satisfactory way in a poem. Concision, one of my preferred poetic tools, wasn’t possible.
I researched how these missions were contextualized in US history, helping me articulate more themes. The craft elements of an essay, ironically, made me circle back to re-examine that era and my memories. Eventually, the craft enacted the very flight maneuver—a holding pattern—that spurred the impetus for the essay’s beginning.
LAURA JOYCE-HUBBARD’s work appears in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction was selected as a Notable in Best American Essays 2022 and 2023 and was a winner of the 2023 AWP Intro Journals Project. She won The Iowa Review’s 2022 Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans, the 2021 Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest at Southeast Review, and the Individual Poem Prize (2021) and Essay Prize (2020) in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition. Laura’s work has been supported by Writing by Writers, the Ragdale Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center, Longleaf Writers, and the National Endowment for the Arts with a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a twenty-year veteran of the US Air Force where she was among the first women to pilot C-130s into the combat zone of Bosnia-Herzegovina, leading NATO peacekeeping missions. An MFA candidate at Northwestern University, Laura is currently serving as a fiction editor for TriQuarterly and as the inaugural Highland Park Poet Laureate in Illinois. Find her on Instagram @Laurajh.
